Ohio lawmakers back bill that would fund demolition of blighted homes

Monday

Mar 19, 2012 at 12:01 AMMar 19, 2012 at 7:01 PM

WASHINGTON - Two Ohio lawmakers are pushing a bill that would provide $4 billion for states to help demolish vacant, blighted homes they say are destroying neighborhoods, increasing crime and decreasing property value.

Jessica Wehrman, The Columbus Dispatch

WASHINGTON - Two Ohio lawmakers are pushing a bill that would provide $4 billion for states to help demolish vacant, blighted homes they say are destroying neighborhoods, increasing crime and decreasing property value.

Reps. Steven C. LaTourette, R-Bainbridge Township, and Marcia Fudge, D-Cleveland, introduced a proposal today that would allow the federal government to issue bonds to states and established land banks for qualified demolition projects.

Each state would get about $40 million - $2 billion total - to tear down blighted and abandoned properties. An additional $2 billion would be focused on states that have been particularly hard hit by the foreclosure crisis, such as Ohio. Fudge said the plan would be deficit-neutral.

The two announced the proposal during a press conference in Cleveland’s hard-hit Slavic Village, where Fudge said two foreclosures typically occur a day. Just down the street from the press conference, a woman and her one-year-old were recently murdered in the garage of an abandoned house.

LaTourette said the bill aims to halt “a tsunami of blight” that has destroyed once-stable neighborhoods.

“It’s just an enormous problem,” said Nan Whaley, a Dayton city commissioner who said Dayton alone has 14,000 abandoned properties. “Until we’re able to really attack blight, we’ll be unable to rightsize the housing market. The people who have paid their mortgages, stayed in their neighborhoods are the ones being victimized.”

The bill would have a direct impact on Columbus, which has more than 6,000 abandoned properties. Mayor Michael B. Coleman recently announced an $11.5 million program to demolish the 900 worst structures, and Franklin County recently partnered with a nonprofit to establish a land bank.

But Dan Williamson, a spokesman for the mayor, said the problem is enormous. Coleman’s program, he said, focused on the “worst of the worst.” Federal dollars, he said, would be a help.

“It’s a need so great, you can’t put a dollar figure on it,” he said.

Jim Rokakis, the former Cuyahoga County treasurer who now heads the Thriving Communities Institute, said if passed, the bill would provide a much-needed source of federal dollars for land banks.

“This potentially would provide a revenue stream on a much larger scale than anything we’ve seen thus far,” he said.

Rokakis said when a home is left vacant, it hurts the entire neighborhood. In some neighborhoods, every third house is vacant. Some of those houses have been stripped to the point where they are uninhabitable.

“This is a state that continues to build, build, build, sprawl, sprawl, sprawl and we’ve gained virtually no population, so there’s a lot of excess supply,” he said. “And that excess supply is a real problem.”